you.’ She wasn’t like that, even when she hurtin. But she didn’t seem to understand what was
going on. She didn’t want to think she was gonna die.”
He shook his head. “You know, they said if we could get all the pieces of her together,
she’d weigh over eight hundred pounds now,” he told me. “And Henrietta never was a big girl.
She just still growin.”
In the background, the radio preacher screamed “Hallelujah!” over and over as Cootie
spoke.
“She used to take care of me when my polio got bad,” he told me. “She always did say
she wanted to fix it. She couldn’t help me cause I had it before she got sick, but she saw how
bad it got. I imagine that’s why she used them cells to help get rid of it for other folk.” He
paused. “Nobody round here never understood how she dead and that thing still livin. That’s
where the mystery’s at.”
He looked around the room, nodding his head toward spaces between the wall and ceiling
where he’d stuffed dried garlic and onions.
“You know, a lot of things, they man-made,” he told me, dropping his voice to a whisper.
“You know what I mean by man-made, don’t you?”
I shook my head no.
“Voodoo,” he whispered. “Some peoples is sayin Henrietta’s sickness and them cells was
man-or woman-made, others say it was doctor-made.”
As he talked, the preacher’s voice on the radio grew louder, saying, “The Lord, He’s
gonna help you, but you got to call me right now. If my daughter or sister had cancer! I would
get on that phone, cause time’s running out!”
Cootie yelled over the radio. “Doctors say they never heard of another case like Henri-
etta’s! I’m sure it was either man-made or spirit-made, one of the two.”
Then he told me about spirits in Lacks Town that sometimes visited people’s houses and
caused disease. He said he’d seen a man spirit in his house, sometimes leaning against the
wall by his woodstove, other times by the bed. But the most dangerous spirit, he told me, was
the several-ton headless hog he saw roaming Lacks Town years ago with no tail. Links of
broken chain dangled from its bloodstained neck, dragging along dirt roads and clanking as it
walked.
“I saw that thing crossin the road to the family cemetery,” Cootie told me. “That spirit stood
right there in the road, its chain swingin and swayin in the breeze.” Cootie said it looked at
him and stomped its foot, kicking red dust all around its body, getting ready to charge. Just
then, a car came barreling down the road with only one headlight.